Hi friends,

Greetings from a vacation bungalow in the Dutch Hondsrug area. We've taken a few days off in an effort to break the monotony of Working From Home During A Pandemic™, and so far it seems to be working. It's nice to spend a few days in a row really focusing on our family, as opposed to everything needed to run it.

I also like the room trips like these provide to take a step back and consider the life I normally take for granted. My personal quarterly review is coming up, and I usually find myself drawn to the bigger questions in the run up. Am I doing the things I want to do? Am I doing the things that matter most? Am I doing them with the right people? I came across the following graphic by Tim Urban a while back, and I found it to be a helpful reminder of the importance of those questions:

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It's easy to focus on the choices that have brought you to where you are, but for most people there are still a ton of choices ahead. The question is which choices you will make, and whether you will make them consciously or not.

Here's what I want to share with you this week:

​The Ride of a Lifetime booknotes: I've been editing some of my book notes to be able to share them on my website, and former Disney CEO Bob Iger's biography is the first to go up. It's mostly highlights and personal notes; it's not a review, and absolutely no substitute for reading the book itself. It should serve to give you an idea of the passages, concepts and examples I found to be the most interesting, and determine if the full book is worth exploring for you.

Investment tracker: I've bought some more shares, and copied my portfolio into the Jong Beleggen template. Jong Beleggen is an excellent Dutch podcast for people who are just starting out with investing, and I'll be using their template to share my portfolio development for anyone interested in following along with my investing journey.

The Best Bits

​How to take smart notes: This short little book by Sönke Ahrens is a fascinatingly concise method for capturing and processing information. I'm currently using a kind of basterdized version of this method for my own notetaking, but I'm already miles ahead of my previous system (which was no system at all). The book is very short and information dense, but if you want an even shorter primer, check out Tiago Forte's summary of the book.

Esports' most famous fighting game moment: IGN recently shared a short clip breaking down "Evo Moment 37". The moment itself comes from a Street Fighter match during the Evolution Championship Series in 2004, in which Daigo Umehara blocks a series of attacks in a way previously thought impossible. It's a perfect example of what makes Esports and some Let's Plays on YouTube so interesting: you're watching professionals at the top of their game pulling off unprecedented feats of skill.

NFTs in context: You may or may not have heard the news of digital artist Beeple selling what amounts to a giant JPEG for $69 million. I'm still figuring out how I feel about NFTs--the format for "minting" digital artworks--and this article does a nice job of putting them into a broader historical perspective. Particularly pertinent seems to be cultural philosopher Walter Benjamin's article "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction", which examines the perception of value for art that can be readily reproduced.

​How to build trust (remotely): I found this article last week, and I thought it was a nice reminder of how some things are much more difficult in our current office culture of incessant videocalls. Team trust tends to build naturally, but this is much more difficult when every interaction happens digitally. This article argues that trust in teams is built on three main pillars, and gives examples for how we might do this while working remotely. I really could have used this when I started my current job in April last year.

See you in two weeks!

Martijn

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